TheHarry Pottermovies feature a legendary cast of veritable acting royalty, including Jason Isaacs asprominent Death Eater Lucius Malfoy. Lucius is the father of Harry’s (Daniel Radcliffe) classmate and rival Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton), and begins the series as the would-be right-hand mand of Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes), stepping back into this role when the Dark Lord returns. However, by the end of the second war, the Malfoy family has fallen from grace in Voldemort’s inner circle, as Lucius makes several perceived missteps and Draco turns out to not be the cruel killer he thought he could be.
Tying into the series' overall themes of love and family, even the Malfoys prioritize each other over Voldemort’s agenda. Lucius' wife Narcissa (Helen McCrory) gives up on the battle entirely and betrays Voldemort in order to be able to get back to the castle and search for Draco.Narcissa lying to Voldemortcertainly would have been the final straw for the Malfoy family, and their lives were probably saved by Voldemort dying almost immediately after this. The Malfoys got repeatedly lucky in the final days of Voldemort’s regime, butJason Isaacs still paints an unflattering picture of Lucius' fall that is very satisfying.
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The Malfoys are a very old wizard family who prided themselves on their supposed purity of blood, andLucius had built his entire life around these ideals. While he did love Narcissa, their marriage was traditional as she was from a similar family (the Blacks). He then joined the Death Eaters' ranks, in pursuit of an idealized wizarding world that prevents Muggle-born wizards from studying magic. However, Lucius learns in the aftermath ofHarry Potter and the Order of the Phoenixthat Voldemort can be just as dangerous to him at the drop of a hat.
Lucius doesn’t go out in a dramatic battle but watches the life he tortured and killed innocents for crumbling around him.
Lucius spends some time in Azkaban after the fifth installment; in an interview withSYFY WIRE,Isaacs' said that he didn’t imagine Lucius handling anything following this very well:
“I was pretty sure of what had happened to him. I don’t know if anybody else needs to agree because that’s the fun of it, isn’t it? […] I think he was broken in Azkaban completely, and he was broken even by having to go there because the dream that he had held out for a long time of being Voldemort’s right-hand man and being celebrated as having kept the flame alive. [That notion] was shattered pretty quickly when Voldemort came back. […] [In Deathly Hallows] you may see he’s always slightly stubbly and red-eyed and drinking whenever he can. I always thought he drank too much. And then, in the final battle at Hogwarts, it became clear to him, particularly when Narcissa and Draco ran off, that there was no place for him in either future.”
It is a surprising but fitting end for such a villain, who is characterized by formality and tradition. Lucius doesn’t go out in a dramatic battle but watches the life he tortured and killed innocents for crumbling around him. What Lucius knew in theory but didn’t fully appreciate until it happened to him was thatVoldemort was always just as willing to dispose of disappointing followers.So, we get to watch Lucius pay a different price for his cruelty. And, as Isaacs says, all his superiority is gone because he is clueless as to what happens next:
“That’s why that last shot of him is him just stuck in the doorway there with his wife and son disappearing in the distance and Voldemort disappearing into Hogwarts. [Lucius is] thinking, ‘What the hell do I do?'”
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Because of Narcissa’s last-minute betrayal and Lucius providing evidence against fellow Death Eaters following Voldemort’s death, none of the Malfoys were sentenced to AzkabanafterHarry Potter and the Deathly Hallows(viaPottermore). However, whereas the Malfoys had been well-respected and had some political sway before, the confirmation of their association with Voldemort entirely destroyed their reputation. Lucius and Draco both lived off the family fortune and engaged in private research and collecting rather than having any standard job — if the Ministry of Magic would even hire them at this point.
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Draco and his wife Astoria Greengrass distanced themselves from the pure-blood ideology they’d both been raised with, which caused some tension with his parents (Pottermore). However, Draco later reveals that Lucius did manage to create the Time-Turner that could travel back years (which is central to the plot ofHarry Potter and the Cursed Child) but never used it, possibly also fearing what it would mean if Voldemort could be revived. At the end of theHarry Pottersaga, Lucius was terrified, and though it left him completely unsure of his own identity, he never went back.
